SOUTH ORANGE, NJ — At long last South Orange Village has a new website. This long-discussed change was soft-launched last week and can be viewed at www.southorange.org.
The new website has several new tools and has improved upon pre-existing ones. Now, on the right-hand side of the front page, there are five clickable categories: “SO Inform,” “SO Connect,” “SO Engage,” “SO Community” and “SO Alerts.”
“SO Inform” gives visitors a streamlined process to subscribe to village updates via email or text message. With the easily accessible “SO Connect button,” residents can easily report concerns or issues and have them sent to the proper village department; through the application, the residents can also follow the progress of their concerns. “SO Engage” allows residents to respond to pending issues in the village with their opinions and concerns via a platform that is in some ways similar to the Maplewood Online forum. “SO Community” provides a geography-based, searchable database regarding the village’s zoning districts, real estate information and similar topics. And “SO Alerts” will be used to make sure residents receive important information in a timely fashion by posting emergency updates online and allowing residents to choose to receive the notifications via various methods.
Civic Plus, which was awarded the contract June 22, 2015, created the website. According to Resolution No. 2015-150, which awarded the contract, Civic Plus would be paid an amount not to exceed $11,500.
“The village has been looking to update/replace our website for several years,” village Business Administrator Barry Lewis Jr. told the News-Record via email. “The contract with Civic Plus was awarded at the end of June 2015, so the actual effort with Civic Plus has been under way for about eight months.
“The ‘design’ template and layout was a combination of Civic Plus and input from the village on our preferences, etc.,” Lewis continued.
Prior to awarding the contract to Civic Plus, the village issued a Request for Proposal and rejected bids from five other responders.
All in all, village officials are pleased with the new website’s appearance and functionality.
“The new website offers a number of new ‘tools’ to residents on a variety of issues,” Lewis said. “In addition, the new website offers a much friendlier user interface and appearance than the old, very cluttered and difficult to navigate former website. In addition, our old website was ‘homegrown,’ meaning you had to know computer code, etc., to make changes and update the site, contributing to the sometimes ‘stale’ content. With Civic Plus, the village’s interface is very easy and department heads with no computer-programming background and just a little hands-on training can easily update and keep their Web pages current and fresh.”
Village President Sheena Collum agrees and is pleased to have the new website functioning.
“I’m very thrilled to have our new website up and running and, over the next several weeks, we will be getting feedback from residents about their user experience and how we can make improvements,” Collum told the News-Record via email. “I’d like to personally thank our deputy village administrator, Adam Loehner, and our IT director, Stan Wilkinson, for their work on this initiative — it was quite the undertaking.”
For many, the arrival of this website came as a surprise, as a new website had been discussed for years with no visible progress. When former village President Alex Torpey was running for office in 2011, creating a new website was one of his campaign promises and, for the four years he was in office, many pointed to the outdated, former website as a criticism of Torpey’s administration.
Torpey told the News-Record that, toward the end of his term in 2015, the village began shifting its focus to a different website form, saying that where he had been going for “an open-source site on the WordPress platform,” the Board of Trustees was looking for “a simpler, more ‘out of the box solution’ than the previous direction.”
Nevertheless, the former village president is thrilled to see the new website up and running.
“I can definitely say I’m glad to see the new site launched,” Torpey told the News-Record via email. “The old one certainly needed an upgrade and the newer site better reflects the BOT’s interest in being more forward-thinking with technology. I’m sure it will provide better access to information for the community, which was always our goal while I was village president, and certainly one which has been continued and strengthened since then.”
The website is still in its soft-launch phase, so residents with suggestions or concerns may let the village know about them via email at itdepartment@southorange.org.